The cinetrix has been battling a cold for the better part of a week, so it is with some confidence that she can assert that Citizen Kane is not the flick you want to teach when you're logy and congested. [Especially not the fucking Salammbo sequences.] Welles's boy wonder magic tricks failed to thrill, and it was hard to sell Bazan's politique des auteurs or the Sarris vs. Kael American iteration of the auteur theory through a phenylephrine haze. Don't try this at home, indeed.
Is it any wonder I skipped out on the noir class screening of Point Blank? Enough already with the flashback-happy narratives, you know? But the cinetrix has managed to see some films "for fun" recently. Two on her visit to Boston and one curled up on the couch at home.
Borat. Say it loud and there's music playing. Say it soft and it's almost like praying. Enough already, Mr. Baron Cohen! Call off your invasion, withdraw your Kazakh shock troops. We surrender.
We did, that is, when on a truly auspicious night, my mother came into the city to see Borat on opening weekend. She never does that, people. The woman watches more movies than anyone I know, but usually they're on DVDs, acquired free through the kind auspices of her interlibrary loan system. Definitely not as part of a jacked-up Saturday night throng in Harvard Square.
There is nothing left to observe about this movie at this late date. I mean, Borat's the cover story on Film Comment, for pete's sake. But I can say something about the experience of watching it, for you reception-theory fans. Go with your [part-Eastern European] mother. Sit next to her during the nude wrestling scene and try not to expire from sheer embarrassment as she laughs until the tears come.
Tears--of frustration--about sums up my reaction to Michel Gondry's boyish bibelot The Science of Sleep. The principals are adorable and the mise-en-scene is the mise-iest, but the story?
Exactly. What story? Dreamy dreamer Stephane may think he's wooing sweet Stephanie with his gimcrack creations, but his lethargy and tantrums come off as anything but cute. With Sleep, Gondry proves that texture is not the same thing as depth and leaves the radiant Charlotte Gainsbourg, and us, stranded babysitting Bernal through his endless fever dreams.
Another flick that left me less wowed than I'd hoped was Rian Johnson's Brick, although as a purely technical exercise it did impress me more on my second viewing. When the cinetrix first learned the premise of the Sundance fave she thought it brilliant. What could be more noir--desperate, stylized, and life-or-death--than high school? Dewy ingenues and flinty femmes fatales abound, and the boys are sweet and tender hooligans.
Sadly, the premise is stronger than the payoff. 
Sure, there's murder, and drugs, and slangy betrayal, but in the end Brick feels like David Lynch lite, a knowing cinematic parlor trick that, like tying a knot in a cherry stem with your tongue, seems a lot sexier if you haven't seen it done better elsewhere.
[The soundtrack is great, though.]
